I think the Community user should bump questions with active bounties aggressively, let's say 1 bump every day per bounty

I think only good will come from it; bounties will get more visibility (this is especially beneficial in the first few days where the question is buried on the third page under the bounty tab) while it won't get annoying: with the current amount of bounties on SO, an average of a bump every 15 minutes. Considering that the average on the activity tab is 3.3 questions per minute this feature would increase the tab's activity by only 2%.

Also I don't know about you but I rarely check the bounty tab; maybe with this feature implemented I can stumble upon a bounty I'm able to answer.

2 Answers
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Hmm, 7 free bumps, plus a listing in the featured tab for only 50 rep.

I don't think it would hurt, but I don't see that it would actually benefit anyone. Further, how do you time them? Someone will eventually complain that their question was always bumped in the middle of the night, or they never saw it bumped. There would be some additional accountability/overhead/complaints.

Answer updated to reflect new and constantly changing reality. Caution do not stand directly in front of moving reality.
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Adam DavisMar 4 '10 at 5:09

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Personally I'd rather see a bounty feature where I can add bounties to questions that are not mine...
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Adam DavisMar 4 '10 at 5:11

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Someone will eventually complain that their question was always bumped in the middle of the night -> Does it matter? If it's bumped when there is no activity it will stay on the top of the active tab longer; it should get approximately the same exact number of views than a question bumped a peak time (the latter case: 100 views in 1 minute; the former: 100 views in 10 minutes). or they never saw it bumped: considering that questions stay on the active tab approximately 30 minutes it would pretty rare to actually see your question bumped, I don't see the problem
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Andreas BoniniMar 4 '10 at 5:11

I don't see that it would actually benefit anyone -> Well it's not going to be super great, but I think it's a little tweak and added incentive to bounties that may be nice. I believe it's trivial to implement; I agree that it's not important but I wouldn't say it won't benefit anyone.
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Andreas BoniniMar 4 '10 at 5:13

@Koper - Middle of the night views are provably worse than middle of the day views.
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Adam DavisMar 4 '10 at 5:15

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@Polly: How so? Besides the fact that there is no "night" and "day", it depends on where you live.. Do you think people who stay up at night are worse programmers? It's 6:18 AM here, and I think I gave some pretty useful answers.
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Andreas BoniniMar 4 '10 at 5:18

@Koper - I know because of the site statistics and having seen a few nights in my day.
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Adam DavisMar 4 '10 at 5:26

Or, in other words, I don't have time to dig out that information now, but you can check out the data dump for various statistics related to time of question posting. It's rather fascinating.
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Adam DavisMar 4 '10 at 5:27

@Polly: yes, during some periods of the day there are less questions posted, I don't argue that. But during those periods (since like you said there are less questions and less visitors) the bumped bounty will stay on the active tab more. Instead of getting 100 views per second for 5 minutes (before reaching page 2 of the activity tab) it will get 10 views per second for 50 minutes. Obviously the numbers are wrong, but I hope you understand what I mean.
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Andreas BoniniMar 4 '10 at 6:07

@Koper - I know exactly what you mean, and my experience is at odds with your assertion. Please back it up with data.
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Adam DavisMar 4 '10 at 15:01

@Koper - I should elaborate: What I've found is that the quantity and quality of answers given to questions posted at night (US time) is measurably less than those posted during the day. They may, in fact, get more face time. Or they might get less. Either way if you compare the record you may find that your assertion does not hold true. But we're going through the process that would happen if this feature were implemented - long arguments about when my rep paid for bounty bump occurred, and why another bounty got bumped during SO's prime time.
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Adam DavisMar 4 '10 at 15:21

Thus that point still stands - it would result in more complaints and problems that aren't trivial to solve. This in addition to the other problems this scheme causes, all so you don't have to visit that featured tab...
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Adam DavisMar 4 '10 at 15:26

How can I get "data" on the quality of answers? I really don't believe that the quality varies based on the time ....
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Andreas BoniniMar 4 '10 at 15:56

@koper about the only easy think to measure is votes per answer, which isn't a perfect "quality" measure, but does represent quality/usefulness/correctness to some degree.
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Adam DavisMar 5 '10 at 4:02

I don't see where that would really hurt anything. It'd be more of an annoyance on SF and SU where there's only ever a handful of bounty questions at a time, but I agree it would be plainly beneficial for SO.

Maybe there is a formula that would work to determine the bump rate based on the number of bounty questions to even it out across the sites. (or maybe that just doesn't even matter...)

The less bounties, the less bumping. It already scales nicely. On SU there is less activity and less bounties too, so the added activity to the activity tab (no pun intended) will be about the same as SO's: 2%.
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Andreas BoniniMar 4 '10 at 3:44